Musings on Buddhism and modern global culture, plus a few miscellaneous topics.

Wednesday, 16 December 2009

Buddhism versus Materialism

Mechanical Mind

Materialism is the belief that all phenomena in the universe, in particular the human mind, are explainable in terms of matter. In other words, such concepts and experiences as beauty, love, spirituality, pleasure and pain are reducible to nothing but physical and chemical interactions. According to the materialist view, the mind does not actually exist, but is an emergent property or epiphenomenon of matter.

Although there are not many people who enthusiastically promote the materialist worldview, it has become the default belief of many scientifically educated people that all phenomena are reducible to the activities of matter.

Of course all religions reject materialism as an article of faith, but none apart from Buddhism attempts to offer any rational philosophical refutation of the materialist worldview.

Christian arguments against materialism

The Christian Churches seem to be completely unable to rise to the challenge of materialism. Christians either return to fundamentalism and assert the literal truth of the Bible with virulent anti-intellectualism, or reject spirituality and 'demythologise' - turning themselves into purveyors of the social gospel.

Whitehead said"Christianity ... has always been a religion seeking a metaphysic, in contrast to Buddhism which is a metaphysic generating a religion." In other words, Christianity does not have the metaphysical foundation needed to withstand materialism.

So nowadays it's left to Buddhism to defend the spiritual aspect of humanity from mechanistic materialism, and show that not everything about the human mind can be explained in mechanistic terms.

The Buddhist argument against all forms of materialism can be summarized thus:

(i) Computers can simulate all physical processes.(ii) There are some mental processes that computers cannot simulate.(iii) Therefore, some aspects of the mind are non-physical.

I enjoy your blog, but I find that your portrayals of Christianity are often overly simplistic. For example, in this post, you assert that Christianity has no rational argument against materialism- it either falls back on a "the Bible says so" or simply blows it all off in favor of a social gospel. While this is certainly true for some versions of Christianity, one can find a much more nuanced and indeed "rational" critique of atheistic materialism among many Catholic authors which largely escape the mainstream media's attention. For an example of this, I invite you to read author Mark Shea's article, "Padding the Case for the New Atheism" here: http://www.mark-shea.com/pad.html.

Thanks for the article, David. My comments about the Christians either relapsing into Creationist obscurantism, or secularising (even with the best intentions) until they become another social services department applies mainly to certain Protestant churches.

The Catholic Church has indeed shown a more balanced approach in recent years. Pope John Paul's encyclical, Fides et Ratio, concerning relativism and materialism in Western philosophy, called for a reassesment and re-emphasis of the spiritual dimension of existence. Pope Benedict's Regensburg Address (which caused such tantrums in the Islamic world) warned of the dangers at the other extreme of irrationalism and fanaticism.

Of course the militant creationists/jihadists and militant atheists feed off one another and are each the others' best recruiting sergeants. Cranmer recently published a disturbing article on what happens when secularism goes mad: http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/2009/12/duke-amachree-sacked-by-wandsworth.html

Interesting take on the different religions and materialism. I was born and raised Catholic (involuntary) and I am looking into Buddhism so I'm really interested in learning as much as I can about it before I decided whether or not to convert. I've read your arguments and the comments above. Highly insightful. Thanks!

The arguments you give against materialism are all very valid, but those are all dualist arguments and can't be limited to Buddhist religion in particular.

Furthermore philosophical dualism was also developed by major Christian philosophers like Rene Descartes or Leibniz - Christian faith is not the Catholic church or the pope. In fact a lot of Christians (especially protestants) see the Pope as blasphemy because of the claim that he is entitled to speak for God himself.

Although I like you picture of the mechanical brain, because most people see computers as "magic machines" that produce images and sound and don't see that they are also just pure functional physical processes and there is no reason why a computer should "come to life" and actual >experience< his functioning like it is often depicted in science-fiction movies.

In fact such a computer would be "over defined" because his actions are already defined by its software and the laws of physic, so the consciousness would be unnecessary or shouldn't exist at all.

With a mechanical universal turing-machine running a simulation of the brain on its mechanical memory-tape this would be even more clear since then you could virtually see what Christian philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz already wrote 1714 about the Qualia-Problem by imagining a giant mechanical brain and stating that even if you would closely examine every moving part of it you wouldn't see anything more than functional machinery and nothing that would give any hint of perception or an experiencing inner life.

Although the sentence "Since all physical systems can be modelled, simulated and explained in terms of datastructures and algorithms" is not 100% correct because it assumes that the Church-Turing-Deutsch-Thesis is true which is not proven yet. For example computers can't calculate real-numbers with infinite precision. So you have to argue that an approximately infinite precision would also be enough to simulate a human brain. Also there are some physical theories stating that the universe too isn't running on infinite precision but deep down in the core all things are binary too.

You should better argue with the "philosophical zombie" thought-experiment which postulates the idea of creating a creature with the exact physical features of a human with the exception that this "zombie" works alone on it's physical structure without any consciousness experience. If materialism would be true such a zombie should be possible but at the same time this would make consciousness needless so there shouldn't be any consciousness at all.

But as I already mentioned: Just because materialism is flawed and therefore dualism (or even idealism) the logical consequence this doesn't mean that Buddhism is true! Dualism just states that there are material and immaterial entities.

Personally I don't believe Buddhism is true because if you go the Tibetan branch you end up with even more stories about gods and ghosts than in Christianity and philosophical Buddhism on the other hand is so simplistic that it has no plausible answers at all.

For example if you assume there are really only the two eternal mechanisms of karma and reincarnation "on the other side" the afterworld you in fact be "more stupid" as the actual world.

Also a Buddhist system would be in the end "hell on earth" with endless suffering through endless rebirth the next trillion years which is why Buddhist becomes a religion hostile to life and therefore real Buddhist back out into monasteries to leave all yearning for living behind them.

So you would end up with an (unknown) God who created the universe and the laws of physics and connected the souls to it to let them suffer endlessly till they can't go on anymore and then never cared about its creation again. I don't believe that this is the real meaning of life.

Oh and just an additional note about "emergent phenomena". In physical terms emergence means that a system has other properties than its components but not that the complete system couldn't be scientifically explained based on its components and the laws of physics.

But now materialist philosophers "borrow" the word from the physicists and use it as a term for "we don't know how our theory could even possibly work but SOMEHOW we will be right anyway".

Brief history: former Catholic turned laggard Buddhist. What I admire most about Buddhism was the fact the the Buddha threw down the gauntlet and challenged those who would liberate themselves to uses their own faculties and common sense, rather than dogma, as guides understanding our lives.

I have followed the arguments of folks like Stephen Batchelor, who argues a more secular line, free of ghosts and goblins, gods and miracles....and reincarnation. Materialism seems to be at the heart of the argument and it's a fundamental issue for me and my (admittedly) haphazard practice. Thanks for providing an interesting way station on that quest for clarity.

+AnonymousThe comment made about MUSLIMS is CORRECT and to the point.I know what Islam is all about! The fact that you are upset, it tells us you do not belong to this group of people discussing the finer point of things that go beyond of Islamic teaching - which is VIOLENCE and DESTRUCTION of the Democratic Societies.

If you are a Muslim, and you are not a terrorist, the key word is "NOT YET".the sixth pillar of Islam is to be jihadist.... meaning you strap yourself with bomb, and walk to a crowded market, school or stadium and kill the infidels all in the name of your filthy allah.